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Software Development through Games

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It’s been about a month since I released the first draft of the Dice Calculator. In that time, I’ve learned a LOT! I thought it would be great to share some of the stats and learnings from the journey so far and give you a sneak peek where things are headed next.

At this time, the Dice Calculator is deployed and supported on the following platforms:

I have also built it for MacOS, but have not released it to the MacOS store. If you’re interested in that version, or a Linux version, drop me a note.

This is what it looks like running on all of those devices (iPad Mini, iPhone 5, Nexus 7, Nokia 1520, Windows Laptop)

One of the best decisions I made was to integrate Google Analytics into the application. This allows me to anonymously collect basic usage data about the application. Specifically, it tracks which screen you’re on, what formulas are used and some basic system information (screen resolution, operating system, etc…).

With that information, I can go to my analytics dashboard and understand how many people are using the application, if they’re using it more than once, and how many users I have. Here’s some examples of the stats as of right now:

417 Users

The Windows Phone is the largest audience. I suspect this is due to being the first platform released and I suspect fewer similar applications.

Installed in 40 countries.

This one really surprised me. I intentionally tried to use as little descriptive English as possible so that folks around the world could use the application, but this really impresses me. Top 10 countries so far:

United States

Brazil

Canada

United Kingdom

Vietnam

China

Italy

Germany

Slovakia

France

28,311 User Events

This data is really only since May 15th since that’s when the first version with Google Analytics went live. The biggest event is people actually doing a calculation, with it being almost a 50/50 split between folks manually calculating by using the number pad, versus those who use the saved formulas. Top three formulas are d20, 4d6k3 and d100.

0 Crashes or Exceptions

I’ve not had any reports of crashes or hangs from the released versions. This makes me feel good. (if you’ve had a crash or hang, drop me a note with a repro).

Next Steps

Well, with a good version out for everyone to enjoy, I thought it would be a good opportunity to start on my next project… The RPG Table Companion! I’ll have some follow-up posts to this one to describe the vision and timeline for getting it out to folks and how you can participate in the design!